By ANGELINA PERALVA*
Commentary on the recently released book, organized by Nadejda Marques and Helena Lucas de Oliveira
There are 46 reports and 22 destination countries. Multiple exiles, forming a true diaspora that the dictatorship promoted between 1964 and 1985. Two countries, mainly Chile and Cuba, were the first to land the exiled families. The coup against Allende diversified the routes and the Portuguese decolonization took some of these Brazilians to Africa.
The book was initially conceived within the Viva Chile collective, created in 2023 by men and women who had lived under the Unidad Popular government as young adults, and by many of their children, who were children at the time. But it is also indebted to the Clínicas do Testemunho Project, which was, for some, a space for elaborating memories that were sometimes deeply traumatic.[I]
Double trauma. There is the one caused by the brutality of dictatorships, which threatened, imprisoned, raped, tortured, killed and denied burial to many bodies, now missing. But there is a second, less frequently mentioned trauma. Trauma caused by the choices of parents, themselves “children of a romantic, violent and idealistic era”, today “a remote world, a chapter in a documentary about the Cold War”.[ii]
In such extreme conditions, the precocity of political socialization stands out. Young children, in risky situations, help to destroy documents, learn to remain silent when the police are about to arrive, and learn not to remember the names of the “uncles” and “aunts” they lived with (“if we were caught and tortured, we would not be traitors”).
The experience of exile is marked by the effort to adapt. There are endless emotional ruptures: pieces of family, friends, dogs are left behind. The effort to recognize the legacy of one's parents is repeated, despite the gap in relation to the political reality of the present, which is that of these adults today. There is the linguistic transition: from Portuguese to Spanish, then to Swedish, German or French.
The languages learned have contingent uses, each one serving a communication group: parents, siblings, schoolmates. And despite the unanimous efforts of families, the appropriation of Portuguese, an obligatory language in domestic communication between parents and children, is necessarily impoverished.
Many have lived in Cuba for years. Some were born there. And the image they bring us from there is different from the idea of an island reduced to the role of a nursery for “PeGueTreCu”.[iii] In the childhood and adolescent experience, school occupies a special place. Several were “scholarships” – they spent the week at school and the weekend at home, which made their parents’ work easier.
But everyone, even those who were not boarders, benefited from a completely free and comprehensive education: alongside the usual subjects, artistic and sports education and various forms of participation in work.
In the “Heroic Vietnam” or “Presence of Lenin” schools, whose names pay tribute to the revolutionary imagination, children studied “Greco-Roman mythology from the age of 8”. “I got to know Indian literature, the Greek tragedians.” Likewise, Jorge Amado, Drummond or Guimarães Rosa.
Access to cinema and popular music festivals, where Brazilian artists were very present: Caetano, Gal, João Bosco, Chico, Sergio Mendes, Djavan, MPB-4, Clara Nunes were references for Cubans. And even soap operas – those of TV Globo and those of TV Headline: The Slave Isaura, Dona Beija or Malu Mulher – they were also there. “In Cuba, culture is breathed through every pore”. Far from state control and the imposition of a particular aesthetic, which dramatically marked the history of European socialism, the openness to the world and its cultural diversity.
There are anthological descriptions in the book. Like the arrival on foot at Lo Hermida Village[iv], in the metropolitan region of Santiago, of a girl wearing a white sailor's outfit, which at the end of the day turns into the brick color of the fine dust on the road. Or of a Brazilian father, who, accompanied by the principal, takes his daughter out of class, forcing her to say a quick goodbye to her Cuban boarding school in order to return to Brazil.
The return, made possible by the 1979 Amnesty Law, was no less complicated. Many who arrived early experienced the terror of police interrogation at airports. Brazilian embassies had systematically denied citizenship to the children of exiles. But these children recognized it as an inheritance from their parents.
Exile, however, produced an insurmountable cultural distance and a problematic sense of belonging – which is problematized in the book. The children who returned did not have “a past” in the country. They considered it “an honor” to be Brazilian. But they had not spent their childhood in Brazil. Many say that exile shaped them.
The return brought the discovery of extended families – so many cousins, so many uncles and aunts, “it was an explosion”! But during the exile, beyond the ruptures and successive displacements, beyond the blood ties, exiled families formed “floating homes of love” – mobile homes like those that, in the Amazon, one of them explains, can be taken from one river to another.
There is much to discover in these accounts – a precious contribution to recent Brazilian history.
*Angelina Peralva is a senior lecturer at the University of Toulouse.
Reference
Nadejda Marques and Helena Lucas de Oliveira (orgs.). Children and exile: memories of childhoods marked by the military dictatorship. Sao Leopoldo, Carta Editora, 2025. [https://encurtador.com.br/KLZGR]
Notes
[I] The Clínicas do Testemunho, a psychological reparation program for victims of the military dictatorship, was created in 2013, within the scope of the Amnesty Commission, in different states of Brazil. Despite the importance and scope of the project, it was discontinued by the Temer government after the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff.
[ii] The passages cited only support a transversal reading of the book; therefore, their authorship will not be identified here.
[iii] Dangerous Guerrillas Trained in Cuba.
[iv] Lo Hermida is one of the most emblematic urban occupations in the metropolitan region of Santiago. Like other similar ones, it was developed in the 70s in response to the lack of affordable housing capable of accommodating migrants from all corners of the country.
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